SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar followed him out onto the black ground, working his jaw where the elbow had come in. ”With my eyes,” he said. ”You’ll have to give me more than that.”

”You watch me. You work out what I’m doing. You pick the tool that answers it, and after all that, you use it.” Dravok turned to face him and let his plain sword drop into his hand out of the light. ”Three decisions where there should be none. It works on me because I’ve been slow on purpose, and it’ll get you killed the first time you meet someone who isn’t.” He rolled his shoulders. ”So forget about learning skills. You have enough of them.”

Trafalgar let himself believe for about two seconds that the words meant they were finished for the day.

”Now you learn how to fight with them,” Dravok said, and came at him.

There was no count, no signal. The old man crossed the ground and Trafalgar had a fraction of a heartbeat to answer, so he took the answer he trusted most and fired [Godstep], mana slamming through both legs at once and tearing him five metres sideways before the strike could reach him. He arrived balanced, Maledicta already coming up, and that was the problem, because arriving and swinging were two separate things with a gap between them the width of a breath. Dravok found it. The flat of his plain sword caught Trafalgar across the ribs and folded him over it, and the black ground came up hard against his shoulder.

He rolled, got a knee under himself, and threw himself into the next exchange with his blade leading. Maledicta met the old man’s edge with a shriek of steel, the shock running up both arms, and Trafalgar poured mana into [Origin Guard], the dense layer forming over his forearm the instant before Dravok’s follow-up came in, taking a blow that would have broken the bone and spreading it out into a deep bruising ache instead. The guard held. It also ate the mana he’d been compressing behind the blade, so when the opening appeared a moment later, [Ruin Pulse] had nothing to work with and died against Dravok’s guard as a dull, useless thud.

”Two tools,” Dravok said, driving him backward. ”One at a time.” He put Trafalgar down again with a boot to the thigh.

That was how the first day went, and Trafalgar understood the lesson long before he could do anything about it. Every skill he owned worked. [Godstep] moved him. [Origin Guard] kept him whole. [Ruin Pulse] went through defences that had no business letting it through. The Morgain techniques hit like the weight of the family behind them. Set beside one another, they were five separate answers to five separate questions, and Dravok wasn’t asking questions one at a time.

The seams were the whole issue. Firing [Godstep] meant committing his legs, which meant a Morgain technique couldn’t open from the same motion. Raising [Origin Guard] meant pulling mana out of the blade, which meant [Ruin Pulse] came out weak or not at all. Beginning [Morgain’s Linebreaker] meant planting his feet, and planting his feet meant he wasn’t stepping anywhere for the length of the charge. Each handoff cost him a beat, and Dravok found every single beat like he’d been told where they were in advance.

Days went by in that black place, and Dravok got worse. He stopped pulling his strikes. The first time Trafalgar mistimed a guard, the old man’s sword took him across the back hard enough that something gave, and Dravok told him to keep his feet and fight on with it. The second time, a knee went into his side and cracked two ribs, and Dravok made him finish the exchange before the pool. Whole stretches of days passed where Trafalgar fought hurt, learning what his body could still do with a shoulder that would not lift properly and a rib grating with every breath, because Dravok had decided that a man who only trained undamaged was training for a fight that would never happen.

Trafalgar stopped counting the trips to the water. He’d go under with blood clouding off him in thin red threads, come out whole, and walk straight back out onto the ground to be taken apart again. Caelvyrn watched some days. Rhosyn watched every one of them, and never once told Dravok to stop.

The change, when it started, was small enough that Trafalgar almost missed it. He came in high with the first cut of [Morgain’s Requiem], the black arc thrown off the edge and turned away on Dravok’s guard, and instead of resetting his feet for the second slash he let the rebound carry him and fired [Godstep] out of the middle of the dance, the burst taking him around to the old man’s off-side with the sword-dance running unbroken. The third arc came out of his arrival rather than after it. There was no gap between the movement and the strike, because the movement had become part of the strike.

Dravok answered it anyway, but he had to give ground to do it, and Trafalgar felt the difference in his own body like a door opening somewhere.

’That’s it. Don’t finish one thing and start the next. Start the next inside the first.’

He chased it after that with everything he had. He built [Godstep] into the recovery of every Morgain technique until the two stopped being separate decisions, until firing the burst mid-swing was the same act as swinging. He learned to hold [Origin Guard] as a thin layer along his forearm the whole time rather than raising it in a rush at each impact, so the mana no longer had to be dragged out of the blade to make it, which meant [Ruin Pulse] could stay compressed behind the edge through an entire exchange, ready and waiting for a contact worth spending it on.

That was the piece that changed the fights. The next time Dravok pressed him, Trafalgar met the charge with the guard already sitting on his arm, took the blow across it without giving up the mana behind Maledicta, and pushed straight out of the block into [Morgain’s Linebreaker], the black mana wrapping the blade as he drove forward. Dravok turned it aside, correctly, at the right angle, and Trafalgar killed the charge halfway and fired [Godstep] out of the collapse, appearing at his blind side with the compressed mana riding the edge. Maledicta caught his shoulder, and this time [Ruin Pulse] had the whole of it to work with, going in deep with that small compact thump and no waste of it anywhere.

Dravok’s arm dropped. His whole side went briefly slack, the way a body does when something inside it gets rung like a bell. For a moment there was nothing between the two of them but the sound of Trafalgar breathing.

The old man reset his feet, rolled the arm out once, and looked at him with something in the flat old face that had not been there on the first day.

”Better.” He turned his plain sword over in his hand. ”That’s three of them talking to each other. Get me the other two.”

Trafalgar wiped his mouth and brought Maledicta back up, and every part of him hurt, and he had never been more awake in his life.

”And Trafalgar.” Dravok lowered into his stance, and the whole of the black ground went quiet around him in a way it hadn’t all week. ”From here I stop standing still for you.”